'Mr. Robot' Podcast: The Very Bad News About Tyrell Wellick's Return

Every week, THR and Post Show Recaps are teaming together for podcasts about 'Mr. Robot' season three.

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for season three, episode three of USA Network's Mr. Robot.]

Despite what much of Mr. Robot season two would have had viewers believe, Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallström) is very much still alive — though that wasn't always the plan.

The third episode of season three pulls the lens back to the night of the Five/Nine Hack, and finally reveals the full extent of what happened when Tyrell and Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) set the world on fire together. As it turns out, Tyrell should by all rights be dead, killed at Elliot's hands — or at the hands of Mr. Robot (Christian Slater), more appropriately. The first scene of the episode sees Robot pulling the trigger on Tyrell, but in a moment straight out of Pulp Fiction, the ice-cold executive survives a point-blank gunshot as the gun jams up. It simultaneously provides an answer for why a bullet casing was found at the fsociety headquarters when Dom DiPierrio (Grace Gummer) found the space back in season two, while also providing an opportunity for Tyrell to successfully make one last case to Elliot.

All's well that ends well, right? Except for one sickening sensation: Elliot as Robot was way too comfortable with killing Tyrell. The only hesitation on our fractured hero's part was the time it took for Tyrell to get away from their computer setup; a bullet to the brain would have created an unnecessary mess, nothing more. Elliot's easygoing attitude toward killing Tyrell, even if it didn't fully pan out, should leave viewers very uncomfortable at the prospect that in all likelihood, whether he knows it or not, Elliot Alderson has killed before — and if Stage Two goes forward, he's likely to kill again.

In the latest episode of the Mr. Robot podcast collaboration between The Hollywood Reporter and Post Show Recaps, hosts Josh Wigler (that's me!) and Antonio Mazzaro dig into the very real possibility of Elliot as a killer, as outlined in the latest cold open. They dig even deeper (or chop into, as the metaphor dictates) other topics from the episode, including:

• The revelation of Santiago (Omar Metwally) as a Dark Army spy, a revelation long in the making;